Secrets and Lies (Cassie Scot)

by Amsden, Christine

  To my surprise, Laura smiled. “My mother likes to call that sort of thing common sense magic. Shouldn’t be magic at all, but it eludes so many people that it can seem magical at times.”

  She made me laugh, and also, momentarily made me forget that she had basically admitted to disliking me. Only for a moment, though. “So you don’t want me to marry your son?”

  She shrugged. “No, but he wants you. Maybe if you’d let me color your hair, the resemblance wouldn’t be so strong.”

  I wasn’t sure I had ever met anyone so matter-of-fact, and I wasn’t sure if I found it refreshing or disconcerting. Maybe both. At least, with her, I knew exactly where I stood.

  “Darker or lighter?” I asked, gesturing toward my hair, which I had no intention of coloring for anyone’s benefit, least of all hers.

  “Redder, perhaps,” she said after a moment’s thought.

  “With bright green streaks?” I suggested. “That way, I can scare away your son.”

  She smiled. “You’ll look like a Christmas present, and besides, he loves green. Better to go for orange.”

  “And take a freckling potion.” I tapped my chin thoughtfully. “Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if there’s any such thing.”

  “I’m sure there is, somewhere. I’d be happy to brew some for you, if you’re interested.”

  “How kind of you. Do you suppose it will work?”

  “At what? Making you look less like your mother? I would hope so.”

  “Repelling your son.”

  “Oh, that.” She shook her head. “Not a chance. I think you and I will just have to find some way to get along.”

  That idea sobered me. Did everyone think, then, that Evan and I were a foregone conclusion?

  “Why don’t you want to marry him?” Laura asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I waved my hand up and down my body. “No magic. He would have total control.”

  To my surprise, she laughed. “You don’t understand men at all, do you?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Before she had a chance to respond, Evan walked through the door, followed closely by his father. Evan looked anxiously between the two of us, but neither of us betrayed our conversation.

  “Did you find them?” I asked.

  “No.” Evan held a manila envelope in his hands. “I’ve got what we need, though. It’s time to go.”

  * * *

  The trip would take well over an hour, an hour I did not look forward to spending with Evan. I never used to have trouble coming up with conversation, especially with him, but of course, everything was different now.

  Around us, the rolling hills of the Ozark Mountains rose and fell in verdant waves. The winding, two-lane road that took us south into Arkansas flowed with the land rather than barreling through it like major Interstates, almost creating the illusion that it belonged. Only the smattering of man-made hovels that interrupted the landscape in the form of abused gas stations or ramshackle farm houses broke the illusion.

  Finally, Evan cleared his throat to get my attention. When I looked at him, he asked, “Are you ready to hear about the girls?”

  “Yes.” Definitely. Anything to push away the silence.

  “There’s a picture in the envelope.”

  I reached into the back seat, where he had tossed the envelope, then opened it to pull out a glossy digital photo print. It showed two teenage girls in front of a small wooden cabin, their faces full of laughter, arms around one another’s shoulders.

  “That was taken last week at camp,” Evan said. “Laura’s the one on the right, Regina’s on the left.”

  Laura had long, straight hair down to her waist, colored in varying shades of black and platinum. Her face was caked in makeup, and a tiny glint of metal hinted at a stud in her eyelid, though it was hard to tell in the photograph. She was lean, almost willowy, and she wore a black “Camp Ozark” t-shirt that washed out her overly painted face.

  The other girl, Regina, could not have been more different from her friend. Regina’s hair was a deep, dark chestnut that remained its lovely natural color. Her round face was scrubbed clean, enlivened by sparkling blue eyes. I hadn’t even noticed Laura’s eye color, I realized, but when I looked back at her face I could still only see the glint of metal in her eyelid.

  Regina was slightly shorter than Laura, her figure showing its curves even beneath the shapeless camp t-shirt. She looked like the girl next door as much as Laura looked like everyone’s nightmare of a Goth child, and yet their faces and posture showed that they couldn’t have been better friends.

  “Laura’s father, Jack, is my dad’s second cousin,” Evan said.

  “Is he a sorcerer?” I asked.

  “No. That branch of the family never had any magic, as far as I know. My father and Jack grew up together around here before Jack moved to Little Rock, and my dad always looks out for family.”

  So did mine. Apparently, they had a little more in common than their mutual enmity.

  “Jack knocked on Dad’s door last night with a hair sample, begging him to help find his daughter. Obviously, we didn’t find her with magic.”

  I shuddered. There was no way the reason for being unable to find a teenage girl with a hair sample and a decent scrying spell could be a good one, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask Evan whether he thought they were dead. I looked back down at the laughing faces of the fifteen-year-old girls whose broken bodies might be lying in the woods somewhere, waiting for discovery.

  I tried to think about what I knew of scrying from my own family. It required something of the target such as fingernails, saliva, hair, or best of all – blood. A knowledge of the search area helped too, but a powerful sorcerer and access to the target’s blood could overcome that obstacle. I had looked into ways of hiding myself from magical spying a few weeks earlier, and found that the only real way to do that was for a more powerful sorcerer to conceal me. Evan had done that for me to keep my own family from spying on me. Knowing Evan, he had probably put in a loophole for himself.

  “What can you tell me about the spell you and your father did?” I asked hesitantly. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a good idea to ask a sorcerer for his secrets, even peripherally, but I thought my careful phrasing would allay any annoyance.

  “There’s not much to tell,” Evan said. He didn’t sound annoyed. “Your family probably did the same basic thing looking for Regina. The bottom line is, unless someone was blocking us, we should have been able to find her anywhere within about a thousand miles of that camp.”

  “But not anywhere in the world?” I pressed.

  Evan shook his head. “No, for that we would have needed blood.”

  If Jack had been raised near a sorcerer, then he would have known better than to leave blood lying around. But the mention of blood reminded me of something I had wondered ever since Evan had saved me. When the vampire nearly killed me a couple of weeks ago, I had lost a lot of blood. What happened to it? Had Evan cleared it away, or kept a sample for himself?

  “So,” I said, shaking off the nagging suspicion, “when did the girls disappear? Did they have time to fly to Europe or something?”

  “According to Jack, the girls weren’t in their beds yesterday morning. They thought they might have just gone to the shower house early, so no one got worried until after breakfast.”

  “But they could have been missing since late Monday night?”

  “Yeah.” Evan frowned. “I guess that did give them time to get pretty far, but why and how? It doesn’t seem likely.”

  I had to agree with him on that, but it was a tiny ray of hope for two young girls who I wasn’t ready to write off yet.

  “Is that all you know?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so. Anything else will have to wait until we get to camp.”

  That was unfortunate, because it meant we had run out of safe topics to discuss, and we were still nowhere near our destination. It didn’t take long fo
r the silence to fill the car again like a palpable presence. I could almost feel Evan thinking of something to say to break the silence.

  “I want to pay you for this case,” Evan said, finally.

  The word “no” was right on the tip of my tongue, but I had trouble forming it. I needed the money, and taking it from Evan wasn’t quite as bad as taking it from my parents, was it? Of course, there was still the life-debt.

  “I think it would be better if we just let this chip away at the debt I owe you.”

  He didn’t respond for a long time, and I thought I understood why. Helping him today wouldn’t make much of a difference to this particular debt. That was the real problem. If I’d set out with a plan to get myself as deeply indebted as I could, I couldn’t have dug myself much deeper. Nicolas and I had spent days going through all the complex variables together, looking through books he snuck out of his parents’ library, some of which specialized in nothing but magical debt. By the time we were done, it reminded me a lot of the tax code, except that in my case, I couldn’t find a loophole. No one else could have saved me that night. I would absolutely have died if not for Evan. He had nearly drained himself to save me. He wasn’t family, nor had he renounced debts entirely. (This option was for people like my cousin, Jason, who regularly saved people from vampires. He could accept favors without penalty, as long as he continued to pay it forward to the community.)

  Evan didn’t mention any of that, though, and finally, I broke the silence. “Okay, fine, I’ll take the money, but we really do need to figure out a way for me to repay you. I... I can’t live like this.”

  “I offered you a way. You weren’t interested.”

  He meant marriage. Biting my lip, I turned to stare out the window at the rolling hills passing by. For some reason, his Prius didn’t have any trouble with the steep inclines. I suspected magic was involved.

  “I shouldn’t have brought it up again,” Evan muttered.

  I couldn’t argue with that, so I continued staring out the window.

  “It’s just, I can’t help but wonder what happened.” Evan paused as he maneuvered through several hairpin turns. “That day you came to Master Wolf’s cabin–”

  The day I’d kissed him. Twice. And learned the truth behind the rumors claiming that he put love spells on girls. “It was a mistake. I was upset.”

  “You’re still upset,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m still here.”

  He was, but with so many strings attached I couldn’t count them.

  “Will you at least look at me?” he asked.

  I turned away from the window, looking at his face in profile. He looked composed, as usual, but there was something beneath it all – something in his eyes, perhaps, that hinted at a man out of control.

  “What do you want from me?” We both knew it wasn’t for us to be friends.

  “I want.... to take care of you.”

  “To take care of me?” The words echoed hollowly around the car as I thought of a response that could even come close to my feelings on the matter. “I’m not a child.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “So, now you’re a mind reader?” He was growing angry. I could tell from the gentle breeze that began playing with my hair and had nothing whatsoever to do with the air conditioner.

  “Of course I’m not a mind reader.” I glared at him, giving him the full force of my ire. “You know I don’t have so much as a gift, let alone magical talent. But that’s why I’m out.”

  “Out?”

  “Out.” I slowed down, sounding out each word carefully, so he couldn’t misunderstand. “I don’t want anything to do with magic.” The including you was implicit.

  “That’s great,” Evan said. “I’ll just tell that to Jacob Travis next time I catch him following you. I’m sure he’ll understand and won’t bother you.”

  “What?” I could feel my heart beat faster. “When?”

  “Never mind.”

  “It was Thursday, wasn’t it? When we went to the movies? I thought someone was following me.”

  “You thought right.”

  I sank back in my seat, my anger fading as I tried to absorb the implications of his words. Of course, I had known there would be danger, on some level. I only wished I understood what they wanted from me.

  “Why?” I asked. “I’ve got no magic. What do they want?”

  He didn’t answer for so long, I didn’t think he was going to answer. We were just pulling into the road leading to camp, beneath a painted sign proclaiming, “Welcome to Camp Ozark,” when he gave me the truth, or at least, part of it. “They want you, Cassie. They want access to your family, their secrets, and even to the magic that might have skipped over you, but will probably show up in your children.”

  My mouth formed the word, “Oh,” but I don’t think I said it. I wanted to deny the possibility, to argue with him, and to find some way to avoid needing his protection – either in truth or in his mind. But we had arrived, and two girls needed me.

  5

  I HAVE FOND MEMORIES OF SUMMER camps. My parents sent me to one most summers from the age of eight to seventeen as a subtle escape from the daily magic lessons, which of necessity excluded me. Nowadays, summer camps aren’t just for camping, although I attended a few of those. I also went to cheerleading camp, softball camp, and had one bad run-in with band camp that I choose to forget whenever possible.

  Most years, summer camp was a peek into another world, and I don’t mean the one outside. I could shoot archery at home (and, in fact, I did). No, the truly interesting revelations came from the other campers, often city kids, who had never heard of Eagle Rock. They didn’t believe in magic, as a rule, or even think about it outside of fairy tales. It’s not that magic doesn’t exist in the big cities, it’s just easier to hide, and, perhaps, more necessary to do so.

  For the most part, I didn’t talk about home when I was at camp. I was never sure if stories about magic would amuse or frighten people, but either way I didn’t feel the need to run the risk of being an outsider. Besides, I was just after a bit of fun, and would not see any of these people again after a week or two.

  Then one summer, when I was fourteen, I ran into something I had never experienced before – an untrained sorcerer. Around Eagle Rock, anyone born with magical potential usually had relatives, even distant relatives, who were willing to at least impart enough basic knowledge to keep people from getting hurt. In other parts of the world – in fact in most parts of the world – this was not always true.

  Untrained sorcerers could be dangerous, both to themselves and to others, and were one of the strongest arguments in favor of magical unification. (Basically, the idea that there should be some kind of magical oversight committee.)

  Liza O’Malley was a case in point.

  She wasn’t assigned to my cabin, which was why it took me two days to notice her. By then, she had threatened and bullied every girl in her cabin into doing anything she asked, and she was quickly spreading her influence to engulf the rest of the camp.

  We were canoeing around the lake in pairs when I noticed a girl with terrible acne sitting alone on the lake shore, her eyes unfocused, staring off into nothing. “Doesn’t she have a partner?” I asked my partner, Kelly.

  Kelly followed my gaze and shook her head, a bit more vehemently than I would have expected.

  “We could let her sit in the middle of our canoe,” I said. “We can take turns.”

  “No,” Kelly said. “That’s not a good idea.”

  I was growing pretty annoyed. I didn’t know Kelly all that well, but she hadn’t seemed like the kind of girl to repeatedly spurn a person for the crime of having the worst complexion I’d ever seen. A part of me considered offering the poor girl some of my mom’s homemade face wash, but I knew that without regular applications, her acne would only come back, and I could not be her permanent supplier.

  Turn
ing back to Kelly, I let her have a piece of my mind. “That’s really mean. She can’t help her complexion.”

  Kelly shook her head. “You don’t get it. She didn’t look like that when she got here. Liza did it. Liza doesn’t like her.”

  “Who’s Liza?”

  Kelly looked around as if she thought someone might overhear us, but the nearest canoes were yards away. “She’s a witch.”

  I snorted. Camp legends were a part of the experience, and I knew better than to take them seriously. “I suppose she’s some hag who lives on an island in the middle of the lake?”

  “No, she’s the girl with the green hair. The one who doesn’t even have an oar, because her partner is doing all the rowing.”

  I followed Kelly’s gaze until I saw the aforementioned green-haired girl. She saw me at the same time, as if she knew we were talking about her, and she gave me what can only be described as an insolent stare. I instantly loathed her. Had I known she was untrained, I might have managed a bit of sympathy, but I doubt it. She was a bully, and not in the sense that many considered Evan Blackwood a bully. He used his mystique as a protection, though many believed he used magic in public more often than he did. Liza, on the other hand, didn’t need protection. Others needed protection from her.

  As soon as we returned our canoe to the beach, I abandoned the other girls to go out in search of the pimply-faced one. She wasn’t hard to find. “Hi, I’m Cassie.”

  She looked up at me, uncertainly. “Aren’t you afraid of being cursed?”

  “Usually,” I said, smiling, “when someone says ‘hi’ and introduces themselves, you should do the same.”

  “Um, hi. I’m Carrie.”

  “Nice to meet you, Carrie. Now, follow me so we can do something about those zits.” I barely had time to see her mouth fall open before I strode away, trusting that she would follow.

  We didn’t join the rest of camp for lunch that day. I had her wash her face three times with Mom’s face wash, and then had her apply some special moisturizer. By the time she finished, most of the acne had vanished, but it would be dinnertime before the last few stragglers disappeared with the rest. Wanting her transformation to appear as spectacular as possible, I took her on a walk through the woods until dinnertime, partly to keep her from seeing anyone until her face looked as good as mine, and partly to gather a few protective plants in case of retaliation.